Spiteful Priest Deck List Guide – Witchwood – May 2018

Our Spiteful Priest deck list guide for The Witchwood expansion will teach you how to play this popular archetype. This Spiteful Priest guide includes Mulligans, Gameplay Strategy, Card Substitutions, and Combos/Synergies!

Introduction to Spiteful Priest (Witchwood Update)

Another Standard year is here, and Spiteful Priest seems to be holding up just fine – the deck used to be a solid, Tier 2 option during majority of the Kobolds & Catacombs expansion, and it’s still very powerful after it, even though it has lost some key cards like a Netherspite Historian and of course a Drakonid Operative.

The deck’s basic game plan remains unchanged. This build sacrifices all of the cheap spells (and there is a lot to sacrifice, since Priest had lots of them) and plays only two expensive ones – Free From Amber and Mind Control. Because of that, both Spiteful Summoner and Grand Archivist (two of the deck’s main win conditions) always pull a big spell for their powerful effects.

When it comes to the new cards, the deck doesn’t run a lot of them. Scaleworm is the most common one, then depending on the build, some players also run Chameleos (it’s fun card, but I’m not big fan of it in this deck), Nightmare Amalgam or Wyrmguard.

Deck Import

Spiteful Priest Mulligan Strategy & Guide

VS Fast Decks

Higher Priority (Keep every time)

Northshire Cleric – The only 1-drop in the deck, 1/3 stats means that you can trade into some early 1/1’s or 2/1’s + it might stop your opponent from developing if he will be afraid of you drawing cards.

Faerie Dragon – Not amazing, but it’s still a 3/2 for 2 + your opponent won’t be able to remove it with spells, which can be quite annoying in some matchups.

Duskbreaker – Against aggro, this card is the backbone of your deck. Duskbreaker clears most early boards and leaves behind a minion with pretty decent stats. It is often a good plan to keep another Dragon (or Netherspite Historian) in your hand if you’re keeping Duskbreaker, just to ensure that you can play it to clear the board.

Tar Creeper – With great stats for the cost, Tar Creeper is an excellent early game taunt. This early in the game your opponent might not have a way to silence or otherwise remove it, forcing them to trade their early board into it.

Lower Priority (Keep only if certain conditions are met)

Shadow Ascendant – With Northshire Cleric. It’s too slow by itself, but if you can follow-up Cleric with it, your chance to win the game goes up by a mile.

Scaleworm – Rush is great, especially if Aggro deck puts up a Tar Creeper in your way to protect the rest of his board. However, keeping it by itself is too slow – keep it only if you have some of your early drops already.

Spiteful Summoner – Keeping a 6 mana card might be too slow against Aggro, but it’s still good if you have some of your early game or a board clear already, like Cleric or Duskbreaker. If you don’t, then hard mulligan for those.

VS Slow Decks

Higher Priority (Keep every time)

Northshire Cleric – Card draw is important. It lets you cycle through your deck faster, meaning that you have a higher chance to drop Spiteful on the curve. It also makes things slightly awkward for your opponent – you might force him to use a removal on a 1/3 in the mid game, where he would prefer to develop something instead.

Shadow Ascendant – Since there is a lower chance that your opponent will have some board on Turn 1/2, this minion might survive – and if it survives, it snowballs the rest of your board like crazy.

Curious Glimmerroot – Good Turn 3 play, can put some pressure on your opponent + you don’t lose a card advantage if you pick the right card.

Spiteful Summoner – Against slower opponents you can be fairly confident you’ll survive until turn 6, and on turn 6 you really want to be playing Spiteful Summoner. The strength of this card comes from making enormous minions several turns earlier than they should be played, and keeping it in your opening hand is the best way to ensure you can play it on curve.

Lower Priority (Keep only if certain conditions are met)

Twilight Acolyte – Keep in the matchups that might drop a huge minion early – mostly against Cube Warlock, where this card is the Giants’ destroyer.

Spellbreaker – Keep in the matchups in which Silence is important, e.g. once against against Cube Warlock, where silencing Possessed Lackey can win you the game.

Twilight Drake – Twilight Drake is mostly played in this deck for lack of a better option, but it does have its upsides. Four attack is difficult for most Priest decks to remove, so against other Priest decks, Twilight Drake is often your strongest minion.

Spiteful Priest Win Rates

Winrate stats are currently unavailable for this deck at the moment!

Spiteful Priest Play Strategy

Vs Aggro

Games vs Aggro tend to be very quick and explosive. Since you run literally no board clears outside of the Duskbreaker, falling behind usually means losing the game (unless you draw your Duskbreaker, of course). You try to stay on the curve and keep trading your opponent’s board. Try to do as many efficient trades as possible – it’s unlikely that you will win the board in the early game, but you can at least reduce the pressure.

Try to use minions over Hero Power as much as possible – play for the tempo. A common misplay when playing this deck is healing a Northshire Cleric on Turn 2 to draw a card instead of dropping a 2-drop, especially Shadow Ascendant. That card is pointless if you will fall behind on the board and lose early. Playing a 2-drop, then 3-drop etc. means that you might be able to keep up with them and your minions are much more efficient when you’re the one dictating trades.

Since you only run 2x Duskbreaker, you need to be a little bit greedy with them. Try to not drop them vs e.g. a board with two 1-drops, unless you’re at a really low life total and you absolutely need to clear them. Another way to immediately impact the board is Scaleworm, which is also a solid card against Aggro – you can run it into something to clear it immediately, and then it will still live, meaning that it’s usually 2 for 1 – good value and good tempo.

Try to drop Spiteful Summoner as soon as possible. The main strength of this card in slow matchups is that it gives you two relatively big bodies to trade with – even if you low roll some mediocre 8-drop it still means that you can clear two minions per turn, which is important if you want to stabilize.

Cabal Shadow Priest tends to be good in the Aggro matchups, at least those who aren’t all-in face decks like Odd Face Hunter. You can steal most of their 1-drops and 2-drops, some of which even have Taunt. E.g. stealing a Righteous Protector vs Odd Paladin or Vulgar Homunculus against Zoo Warlock. But don’t really be picky about it – even stealing a 1/1 on the curve is better than keeping it if you have no other good plays anyway. Every card that can clear a small minion right away is good.

Surprisingly enough, Grand Archivist is also an amazing card against Aggro if you survive that long. The card starts out slowly, but gives you up to 4 turns of powerful plays – even Mind Controlling a small minion is great if you don’t have to actually pay mana for that.

While not exactly Aggro, if you face another Spiteful deck, keep Twilight Acolyte for the minion they summon from Spiteful. Otherwise, if they summon a 12/12 or something, you have literally no way to deal with it (at least until Grand Archivist turn).

Vs Control

When facing Control decks, your game plan switches to all-in offense in most of the matches. There is no reason to play defensive, as a slow deck won’t put pressure on your anyway. You want to start putting pressure ever since the first turns, but not by completely dropping the value. For example, drawing cards from Cleric is still great. One of the best way for Control deck to win against you is run you out of resources, so try to save some of them.

Generally, in the early game you can go all-in on the board. One of the ways to win with this deck is actually through the early game aggression, something opponents rarely mulligan for when facing Priest. Shadow Ascendant is the early game MVP – if they have no way to clear it, it can snowball the game in your favor. Try to deal as much face damage as possible, and overextending a bit onto the board is not bad if you have the mid game refill.

As much as your early game are still quite easy to take down by AoEs and removals, your Turn 4+ plays might not be. Twilight Drake (or Scaleworm if you have something to clear), Cobalt Scalebane and Spiteful Summoner is like a dream curve. Remember that you’re playing the beatdown role, so leave trading for your opponent, as long as you can get away with it. Trading up is okay to protect your bigger minions, but do not trade that 5/5 into let’s say some 2/3. Every point of damage is important.

In the mid game, try to not overextend, because that’s when the big AoE removals come into action. You always want to have some sort of board refill. So if you have one Spiteful Summoner and a big guy on the board already, don’t play another one into e.g. Twisting Nether. Instead, play for example a Curious Glimmerroot – you will still have an extra 3/3 body on the board, but getting AoE’d won’t hurt that much, because you’ve got a card from it already anyway.

One thing to keep in mind is that Grand Archivist will never cast a spell that doesn’t have a target. So if you play it on an empty board, it will always cast a Free From Amber – you don’t have to worry about burning Mind Control for no reason. At the same time, the minion is most effective when your opponent has a single, bigger minion on the board (e.g. Control Warlock with Voidlord). Him casting Mind Control to steal it is a massive swing, which often leads to a quick victory.

Twilight Acolyte works very well if you need to neutralize a big threat, such as an early Mountain Giant from the Warlock. But there’s nothing wrong about using it on e.g. 3 or 4 Attack minion to just keep the pressure and prevent that minion from killing one of your own. Later into the game, you can combo Twilight Acolyte with Cabal Shadow Priest to steal any minion from your opponent. It’s like a higher tempo Mind Control, but costs 2 cards. It’s AMAZING way to deal with your opponent’s late game minions. They will often try to drop it on Turn 9, before you can Mind Control it, and you can punish them this way. Voidlord is one of the best minions to steal with that combo – not only you get a great Taunt with Deathrattle + more minions on the board, but you remove it from your opponent’s Bloodreaver Gul'dan‘s pool of Demons.

Spiteful Priest Card Substitutions

The deck is actually pretty cheap – this specific version doesn’t run any Legendaries, but it does run quite a lot of Epics. Most of them are necessary and irreplaceable, but some of them can be substituted by something else. Check out the whole list below.

Curious Glimmerroot – 3/3 for 3 that gives you an extra card is pretty solid. It’s an okay play both in terms of tempo and in terms of value. But if you don’t have it, replacing it isn’t terribly hard. You can play Nightmare Amalgam instead, and if you don’t have it either, you can try out an Acidic Swamp Ooze + either Squashling or Stonehill Defender. You can actually replace one with Acidic Swamp Ooze even if you don’t need a budget replacement – it’s a solid tech card to have.

Cabal Shadow Priest – Not necessary, it’s just solid in the current meta + it has a great late game combo with Twilight Acolyte vs slow decks in the slow matchups. If you don’t have it, you can run Wyrmguard instead.

Spiteful Summoner – It’s the reason why you build a deck this way in the first place, you can’t replace it with any card.

Grand Archivist – One copy is also absolutely necessary. It lets you cast all of those expensive spells for free, as soon as Turn 8. Provides game-winning swings in lots of matchups.

A Hearthstone player and writer from Poland, Stonekeep has been in a love-hate relationship with Hearthstone since Closed Beta. Over four years of playing and three years of writing about the game, he has achieved infinite Arena and multiple top 100 Legend climbs.

The idea was to enable Lady in White’s effect to function as a secondary win condition, I think. Keleseth + Lady make for great synergy, 9/9 Nightscale Matriarchs or 10/10 with Keleseth buff on a 7-drop is nasty as hell. I’ve also been personally experimenting a lot and I plan on removing Twilight Drake and adding Tar Creeper again for the smae reasons. Twilight drake is very counter-synergistic to Lady in White (defaults to 1/1 in stats because of how its HP and battlecry work, meanwhile Tar Creeper gets to 8/5 on enemy turn with Lady buff and 9/6 with Keleseth and Lady. Ysera is there because the deck is slow-paced and control-oriented and she’s obviously a great value generator. Becomes 12/12 with Lady in White buff.
I think this is a great change to the deck since it stops relying solely on drawing Spiteful for the win condition and allows you some other way of winning, since Spiteful is not as reliable anymore, the mana nerf hurts! Keleseth is obviously a staple in spiteful decks and WR skyrockets if he’s in your starting hand. I found this new spin interesting and fun! Even though I rank low because I’m a relatively casual player/collector, I think if I commit I can climb with this deck. What are your thought on it, Stonekeep?

It was when the nerfs first hit live, but I imagine that a lot of experimental decks do well. Later on I found I was losing way more than I was winning. The deck just can’t keep up with aggression, even when the opponent’s deck isn’t full aggro. I eventually ditched it, but it was super fun and I love using niche/fringe legendaries like Lady in White. Felt great to win and didn’t feel so bad when I lost, but it was just absurdly slow.

I’ve been running a Keleseth and Lady in White version that’s been working very well. It still has great dragon synergy and it seems you almost always get at least one win-more card (Keleseth, LiW, Spiteful, Archivist) in time to play it on curve.

It has a suprise factor against your opponents cause most people will mulligan like against Control Priest. Really strong and fun to play deck. You have board presence, board clears and summoner just destroys your enemy with dragons on the board.

very very mess deck, it is not an aggressive deck (super weak early game), nor midrange (don’t have control tool like spell or weapon), or control ( only 2 aoe clear, and weak taunt minions, can’t survive to late game) .

Its actually very good with a great early game with shadow ascendant and northshire cleric, Midrange, you mostly depend on getting spiteful summoner, if you dont, even your dragons can spiral out of control thanks to shadow ascendant and cobalt scalebane, and for control, you can sub in primoridial drakes and maybe a death knight

This deck is a very solid start. after a break from the game i picked it 2 weeks ago and went straight to 10 with this. Eventually ended up replacing both glimmeroots by a stonehill defender and a primordial drake, both to bolster my dragon power

I’m currently running a Keleseth/Lady in White variant of this deck with some success. Does anyone have any thoughts or experience on possibly running a copy of Void Ripper? I feel like the surprise burst from the big taunts or even turning Ultrasaur into a 14 power could swing some

I’m running the same variant. Haven’t tried void ripper but it’s effect seems a little too situational, and sometimes detrimental to your games, since you normally can’t go wide in board and want every minion to survive as long as possible. I can’t beat Paladin or Druid on the number of minons on the board and have only 2 duskbreakers for aoe damage, so can’t see value in lowering the health of my minions. Also void ripper becomes useless after you play Lady in White. I would ratter use some tech like glutonous ooze for weapon removal.

Bad deck is bad. Losses to anything that has the ability to attack. In rank 5 and lost 4 games in a row (Hunter, Warrior, Mage, Shaman). Would recommend a better meta deck like odd pally, shaman otk or cubelock.

Yeah, as the meta is new, I have missed several Glimmer’s and wanting to temporarily replace them until I know what is in each deck. I would try to throw in some tech’s like perhaps Gluttonous Ooze/Harrison Jones and Cabal Shadow Priest. Stoneskin Basilisk isn’t bad, or Bone Drake for the Dragon Synergy. Interested to hear what the author thinks about these suggestions. Even a random Fungalmancer isn’t too bad… Lots of tech options to replace the Glimmer for now.

I’m a bit tight on dust, so I replaced it with Nightscale Matriarch. It doesn’t do bad, but often it feels like a dead card (though it does help with dragon synergy), because I don’t think that using 9 mana for a 7/12 is that good. For now it’s working well but I think I may replace it with something else later, if not Glimerroot. Thanks for the suggestions!

to be really honest, if you don’t know what Chameleos is for, then you are better off not using it. Otherwise I’m thinking the closest priest has to chameleos would be crystalline oracle. Semi decent value.

This deck is so broken now, i got 85 % win rate from rank 13 to rank 9 and i made it in just few hours…a little problem can be baku hunter but against all other decks no problem at all, i have 100 % wintrate against paladin and shaman, only lost against cube warlock 1 game and against baku hunter 2 games

As a budget (newbie) player I’ve found that I can replace the Historian with Secretkeeper with this deck build and I also dropped the Twilight Drakes for a Bone Mare and a 2nd Kabal Songstealer. I call this a spiteful confusion summoner. It seems to be more affective for early draws while giving the impression that I’m playing a secret priest deck which draws early attacks away from my hero.

I disagree, you just have to adapt to a more control style until ~8-10 mana. Played against control lock and drew 2 MCD, just made sure he didn’t get his Void Terrors out to early then stole both of them.

I’m wondering what the replacements for Drakinoid Operative, Kabal Songstealer, and Kabal Talonpriest are going to be when they move them to Wild. I dusted 2200 worth of cards for this deck, and after 16ish games my winrate is about 75% or higher in low ranks (although maybe that’s normal, because a lot of players in Standard Ranked don’t have competitive decks at all). I’m already substituting Netherspite Historian with Faerie Dragon, which has worked out fine IMO, but the removal of the other three cards will be quite big though. There’s still more than ten months until they’re moved, but I suppose I should save up my gold to buy a lot of packs when I need to get more substitutes. I want to get my Priest to golden so this shouldn’t be an issue, unless Blizzard doesn’t release any replacements. Thanks for posting this deck it’s very fun. 🙂

I’m missing some cards, so I had to wing it a little. Climbed from rank 17 to 10 in a few hours. Now I’m kind of stuck again, and you feel the missing cards, and think oh how nice if I had card x now 😀 I’m seriously thinking about dusting cards from other classes to craft some of the missing cards, should I?

Thanks, great deck and quite cheap. Currently on rank 12, highest i’ve got to before was 15. Usually play shaman so really struggling with lack of early play, sometimes it can get too out of hand before turn 6 – i’ve replaced glimmerroots with 2x Keepers of secrets as a lot of the decks I play against are either secrets mage or hunter. Sometimes murloc paladin has some too.

While I get the inclusion of the water I would only use one and I wouldn’t be removing glimmeroot as he is one of priests strongest cards. I’d probably take out a drake or an acolyte, but that’s just me. And as for the early game, always try to Mulligan for your low cost cards and try keep a duskbreaker vs aggro decks as this card will single-handedly win you those matches

Replace 1x Twilight Drake and Harrison Jones with 2x Cabal Shadow Priest to enable the steal combo with Twilight Acolyte, that won me a lot of matches, made some players summon nothing with Bloodreaver Gul’dan several times.

What do you think about including stonehill defenders x2 instead of historians (don’t have the adventure). They would provide the deck with another 3rd turn play that has taunt and okey stats against agroo , but most importantly provides you with another taunt

That’s the only reason I’m happy they’re not doing Adventures anymore, so annoying for F2P players to complete decks if they don’t have them. Do you have Keleseth? Unless you play Wild I wouldn’t recommend getting the Adventure this close to rotation, and Keleseth would be fine until then.

This is a little off topic, but as as mainly a free to play player, I loved adventures. It’s only 700 coins per stage, and you can collect the compete set. We usually knew before hand when new expansions/adventures were coming out and you can save up for it. In regular expansions, no way I can get all epics and legendaries as free to play.

I’ve been playing this deck all through January and am now experimenting with substitution for the upcoming nerfs.

On another note though: Twilight Drake feels super underwhelming and with the amount of silnce that i currently run by everybody it mostly removed way too efficently. I’ve played a couple of games with Hoarding Dragon as a sub. So far it has been ok. What are the mai reasons, that this card never comes up in the discussion?

Thanks! Giving your opponent two mana can be pretty devastating, or in some cases even two cards. Now that Raza has been nerfed it’s probably more playable than it was, but I’d still get excited if someone played it against me.

Yeah! for example, lowing Giants cost for warlock, or Arcanes in Druid, give Rogue in general more options, set OTK paladin, In fact u give me the idea to use that card on a mill rogue, maybe works better.

What do you think of one Book Wyrm? I put it in because I was missing one curious glimmer root. I’ve had pretty good success with it to combat the agro pirate decks. It also does fairly well against priest removing lyra and combos well with turn 7 bonemare.

That’s an interesting idea. Since Corridor Creeper isn’t really a 7-drop the deck could probably tolerate it. It might be good, but maybe playing a 4/6 on 7 is slow for what this deck is trying to do at that stage of the game.

Medivh might be okay, but this deck doesn’t want to actually play it’s spells. It also has a very small draw engine, so I imagine Atiesh would be sitting on the field not getting value a lot of the time. Who knows though, it might help in some of the grindier matchups. Zola might be cool (it could also grab you more Duskbreakers), but this deck already has a lot of value and Zola would hurt your tempo if drawn too early.

It’s hard because this deck doesn’t have a very strong turn 1 and 2. You have to be really aggressive, and if Highlander plays Raza and Anduin on curve they’re probably going to win. Just try to rush them down.

It was good to climb til level 10, but after that… impossible to win against Warlocks with Void/Guldan DK/The legend that revives the deathrattles OR against the Priests that have Shadowreaper/Raza… and i ONLY encounter those 2. Every time. No exception.

I don’t really want to include Shadow Ascendant, but still want to keep Netherspite Historian in the deck. Any good substitutes for Shadow Ascendant other than Faerie Dragon? I really only have two empty slots for this deck and I haven’t even added Spellbreaker.

That’s been Priest’s problem since the game began, never having any good 2-cost minions. It got its first REALLY good one with Radiant Elemental, but for this deck that might as well be River Croc. You could try out Mana Geode but that seems bad to me. There’s also Acidic Swamp Ooze (for Mage and Warlock surprisingly) and Golakka Crawler.

I removed a 1x shadow asc and the 2x glimmer for 1x doomsayer 1x mindcontrol tech 1x skulking geist. Doom sayer helps against aggro, mct is very useful both against aggro (pally) and cubelock and geist is very good vs razakus, jade druid warlock and many others. With this changes my winrate went up nicely

There’s a lot of aggro out there and you will consistently lose to it. If you fail to draw Duskbreaker or lack another dragon to activate its Battlecry, I’m afraid it’s over. However, versus control? It’s great.

Spellbreaker is a staple for me since last expansion and i never regret having it. In fact won me a lot of games. Mind control u have to wait til turn 8 with archivist if u run 2 free from amber and u have 1 mind control in hand u only have 33% chance to cast mind control else u wait til turn 10 to spend your whole turn which you dont want that in best senario, u want to keep playing minions not spells. Cutting 1 free from amber even u have 1 mind control in hand turn 8 archivist becomes a 50% mind control.

Even if you whiff on a voidlord or whatever turn 8 with archivist hitting amber and them being able to kill it off before archivist goes off again you just shrug it off and try to grab a couple of the next 3.

Nice writeup. I like cutting the glimmerroots for mistress of mixtures to help with agro. The deck has plenty of gas if you can get there and even outvalues most locks. Plus glimmerroot has pretty terrible win% stats in the deck.